Consumers commonly enjoy the convenience of packaged food products such as dough products. In particular, raw dough products have gained commercial success as provided in frozen or refrigerated forms to facilitate consumers making home baked dough products. Moreover, such raw dough products are typically packaged to facilitate consumer use, as desired.
Many dough products suitable for packaging as frozen or refrigerated products have been developed. As an example, rolled dough products such as cinnamon rolls and other pastries as well as non-rolled dough products or slugs such as biscuits, cookies, rolls and the like are frequently packaged in frozen or refrigerated forms. Rolled dough products are typically made by providing a strip or sheet of dough (with or without a topping or filling) and rolling the strip or sheet as a spiral. In the case of a dough sheet, the roll can be divided transversely into plural dough products. For certain packing and handling applications, it is desirable that non-rolled dough products have the general appearance of a rolled dough product such as a cinnamon roll. As such, a dough slug may be scored with a spiral pattern to create a single serving portion that has the general appearance of a rolled dough product. Such scored dough slugs may be more economical to produce thereby reducing the cost to the consumer.
Devices for creating consumer usable packages of raw dough slugs that cut a sheet of food product such as dough into individual slugs or pieces and the packing the individual dough pieces into containers have been developed. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,427,783 to Reid, which is fully incorporated herein by reference, describes one such dough cutting and packing apparatus. Additional other features and modifications applicable to the Reid apparatus are included in U.S. Pat. No. 5,247,782 to Rejsa, which is also fully incorporated herein by reference.
The cutting and packaging apparatuses of Reid and Rejsa include an endless cutting unit formed by a plurality of intermittently movable, interconnected cutting plates. A sheet of dough is usually continuously supplied to the apparatus by a conveyor and enters the cutting and packaging apparatus at a first end of the cutting unit. A transversely extending roll (transverse to the direction of dough sheet travel) presses the dough sheet against the cutting unit to divide the dough sheet into a plurality of individual dough pieces that are held within hexagonally shaped cutting openings formed in the cutting plates. The apparatus further includes plungers positioned above the cutting unit that can be moved in a reciprocating manner relative to the cutting unit by way of a microprocessor-controlled servomotor as described by Rejsa. During a dwell period of the intermittent motion of the plates, the plungers move downward so they contact the dough pieces held within the hexagonally shaped openings in the cutting plates thereby removing the dough pieces from the cutting unit. Continued downward movement of the plungers causes the individual dough pieces to enter the open ends of containers positioned beneath the cutting unit. The reciprocating movement of the plungers is synchronized with the intermittent movement of the cutting unit so that the cutting unit only moves when the plungers are not extending into or through the openings in the cutting plates.
As mentioned above, for certain products it may be desirable to score a dough slug with a spiral pattern to give it the appearance of a rolled dough product. Such scoring is conventionally done while the dough sheet is positioned on the continuous conveyor that supplies the dough sheet to the cutting and packaging apparatus. A difficulty with such an approach is that it can be difficult to assure proper alignment of such a spiral pattern or scoring on the dough sheet with the cutter that will divide that scored portion from the dough sheet (i.e. so the dough product is properly scored). This is due, in part, to the transition from continuous to intermittent motion that the dough sheet experiences after it is scored and before it is cut.
The dimensional stability of dough that is transferred between conveyors can be difficult to control. That is, certain food products provided in sheet form, such as sheets of certain dough based food products, can be dimensionally unstable. Such dimensional instability can be due to internal stresses in a food product itself or may arise from external forces such as from gravity or from certain processing steps. A sheet of food product such as a dough product that is transferred from continuous motion to intermittent motion may be significantly distorted or shifted as a result of such transfer. As such, a score formed on a sheet of dough product can become misaligned during such conventional processing, such as a cutting process to divide the sheet of dough product into individual pieces, as a result of such transfer between conveyors.